Most likely a sinking feeling has befallen you. Your back tightens, a lump develops in your throat, and you begin shifting from one foot to another . . . all because you prefer your blues as natural, as true as they can be.

They’re jeans, for heaven’s sake!, you muster. Made of the most durable, enduring, rugged fabric there is—burlap must be a close second. They can take whatever grit comes their way: In fact, the texture loves it. Jeans love to live with you, to share in your exploits; they’re trusty like that. That’s their actual reputation. They only get better with time, with age, with wear.

All this reasoning falls on deaf ears and earns you only blank stares, of course; exhausted, you start from the beginning.

For me, it was a pair of Acne Studios boyfriend jeans with such swag, with such grace, yielding a kind of insouciant elegance rolled up into folds of denim. They bagged ever so, clung to my hips just right, and made me feel like an extra in an Aaliyah video. They were the denim equivalent of a unicorn. Subsequently, I wore them often, and they became softer and more unique with each turn. The texture was breaking down; the whiskers were growing more pronounced. But when a spill stained them, I finally decided to throw them in the wash. Until then, I’d been airing them out—I would hang pairs by their belt loops outside on my small veranda to remove faint odors, without losing any of the character and shape my life had given them.

I turned the washing machine dial to cold, walked away for an indeterminate amount of time, and when I returned, my beloved jeans lay mangled at the bottom of this so-called cleaning device. I was devastated. The soft, smooth texture was hardened by the thrash of the spin cycle and deluge of water; they were paler than last I remembered; the shape was askew. Even an earnest air-drying did nothing to restore what once was.

So often our clothes are shorthand for things we’re hoping to visually convey, whether donning a pair of Gucci fur-laced shoes displays your whimsy or throwing a satin baseball bomber over a fanciful dress illustrates your take on a pared-down femininity. Without this particular pair, the story had changed; my clothes couldn’t translate what I wanted them to say. When I tried to wear them, I no longer felt like myself. And so I resolved for me, washing denim—especially premium denim—was too dangerous an endeavor, one best left alone.

So I did just that. I began to accrue a supply of vintage of denim—Levi’s, Lee, Wrangler—along with premium pairs from the likes of Acne Studios and Madewell, and refused to budge on washing them. The P.T.S.D. of losing my beloved Acne Studios jeans was far too great for one woman to take. A stint working at A.P.C., the behemoth of denim, would only solidify my ethos, the French jean atelier essentially institutionalizing the “no-wash” mantra for its famed raw denim in the employee handbook.

Sleep in them to break them in.

Run into the ocean with them on, then roll around in the sand to break down the roughness.

Throw them in to the freezer if they become intolerable in smell, but whatever you do, do not wash them.

Just a few of the credos I passed along to “denim heads” each day who would often return to show us how their raw jeans had eventually broken down exquisitely from their original, stiff state. The pronounced outline of a wallet; beautiful honeycombing; the softest of textures; paint splatter, indecipherable stains. These pairs were utterly beautiful when undisturbed and left to just be what they are . . . essentially elevated workwear.

Bishop was initially sympathetic to my sizable trauma over the ruined Acne Studios jeans but was largely unconvinced that me not washing non-raw jeans—jeans with a minimal amount of stretch—would do me any good. “There is always a feeling of ‘they’ll never be the same,’ even the [pairs] that are brand new that you buy at Barneys or Mother denim, that are made of the softest, stretchiest, gummiest denim . . . but then if you don’t wash them for two weeks all they are is dirty. They are not any more suited to your body than they would be otherwise,” the denim aficionada explained matter-of-factly.

Blessed with an actual denim cycle on her dryer (“The most thoughtful thing my husband has ever done when buying a washer and dryer!”), Bishop explained her scrupulous cleaning regimen that includes washing her white jeans every week (a habit she picked up from Vogue’s Tonne Goodman, a famous devotee of white jeans), any pair with stretch every two weeks, and her Levi’s after ten to fifteen wears.

“But, come on, isn’t she ever nervous they’ll change?” I prod. Recounting her own first pair of Levi’s 517s, Bishop explained how she continued to make alterations upon alterations over the years, taking them to Daniel Corrigan at Simon Miller for repair before resolving that this was simply the course of denim—they were meant to change, evolve. “You don’t want to ruin them or ever do something to them that will make them unwearable, of course. But if they change, I mean, isn’t that life? I mean, nothing ever stays the same forever.” She added playfully, “Denim is life, Marjon!”

A quick call to _Vogue’_s intrepid Denim Editor would paint a different picture, with Kelly Connor taking a laid-back approach to a very serious passion of hers. “I basically don’t wash my jeans. If it’s vintage Levi’s and raw denim, I never wash them. And I haven’t gotten to the gross point—or maybe I have and I’m just not that clean in general . . .”

Ah, a girl after my own heart.

Unlike Bishop’s slightly Zen take on the inevitable changes in denim that come with her strict cleaning mantra, Connor lets her jeans “get their character.” In the case of stains, she’ll spot-clean them, then spritz salt water onto the pair and allow them to air-dry outside. The only pairs she does clean (and not very often at that, she admits) are her stretch jeans, which she reserves for horse-riding. “They’re not really my ‘fashion jeans’,” Connor explains. “They’re not my ‘cool jeans’ in my closet that I adore anyway.”

However, she, like Bishop, does make an exception for her white jeans—but concedes that sometimes even a distressed or messy pair of white jeans can look great too. Ultimately, Connor isn’t keen on disturbing perfection. “You know when you have a T-shirt and you can wash it a million times, and it’s going to be the same. And then there are other ones where you’re like, ‘Oh, but it’s so perfectly baggy and worn-in without being see-through.’ Vintage jeans should never be touched like that.”

I couldn’t agree more.

I hung up and felt my “denim shame” subsiding. While both these denim gurus may diverge a bit on the subject, they actually taught me the same thing: Jeans, after all, are simply jeans and ultimately can withstand either a little dirt or the slight changes caused by a cold rinse. Whichever I so chose.